Composition in Silver

In honor of today being my parents' 25th wedding anniversary, I created this thematic composition on the theme of silver. I'm ashamed to admit that it sort of snuck up on me so I only had a few hours last night to put it together, but I think it came out alright.

I actually got the idea for this composition while taking a drink from one of the drinking fountains at the Vis, where the combination of silvery brushed metal, liquid water droplets splashing and frolicking about and a low sun angle added up to create a sublimely beautiful spectacle. The picture below from my phone is my best attempt to capture it, but it was much more beautiful than it appears here.

As mentioned, total work on this picture was only ~4-5 hours, a fair portion of which was waiting for Blender to render the image so I could see how it looked and what tweaks needed to be made (in fact the final render, which I left going overnight, took almost three-and-a-half hours by itself). The metal texture was made by me in GIMP, and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out for the amount of time I had to work on it. I was trying to replicate the white scratches you can see in the picture above. The modeling and fluid animation  were done in Blender, and rendered with the new internal Cycles engine that achieves much more physically realistic pictures. For instance, that water has the index of refraction of water at room temperature, and the light in the scene is realistically being refracted through it. I haven't done much fluid animation before and have had mixed results when I tried, so I'm really very happy with how this came out. I might even animate a short video of it splashing in the fountain in the near future.

Finally, happy silver anniversary Mom and Dad! Here's to another 25 years!